Dr Claudia Ghidini receiving her Award from HRH The Princess Royal, with Master Engineer Andrew McNaughton, at the Engineers Trust Awards Dinner on 9 June 2026

Winner 2026 (Medal and £1000 Bursary) – Dr Claudia Ghidini

Claudia Ghidini is a Biomedical Engineer passionate about transforming the lives of children with limb-loss through research, innovation and global collaboration. Originally from Italy, Claudia graduated with First Class Honours in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where her fascination with human biomechanics and medical technology first took shape. Her academic excellence and curiosity led her to Imperial College London, where she pursued an MSc in Biomechanics.

During a volunteer experience in Mozambique, Claudia witnessed the harsh realities faced by children and people living in low resource settings. This encounter profoundly shaped her future direction. Motivated to engineer practical solutions for those most underserved, she dedicated her Master’s thesis to developing an affordable prosthetic liner tailored for low income countries – a project that later secured funding and was successfully trialled in Nepal. Claudia has now finished her PhD at Imperial College London, which addressed one of the most overlooked challenges in global health: the impact of war, disaster and limited access to care on children living with lower limb amputations. Her research spanned different countries – including the UK, Cambodia, Ukraine, Türkiye, and Jordan – where she has worked directly with children with limb loss, their families, and clinicians.

Her doctorate produced pioneering contributions. Claudia conducted the first detailed analyses of clinical casefiles and user experiences to identify how growth leads to tightness, limb length discrepancy and poor fit, and how these issues are faced and managed daily by children. She complemented this with motion capture studies investigating how poorly fitting prostheses affect children’s mobility and developed predictive anthropometric models that define how the residual limb grows over time – providing the technical specifications needed for designing prostheses that accommodate growth. These breakthroughs led Claudia to begin designing an adjustable, modular prosthetic socket that grows with the child — reducing clinic visits, preventing pain and improving comfort.

Claudia paired this research excellence with remarkable commitment to societal impact, having built partnerships with rehabilitation centres worldwide to ensure that innovation and research reach children most affected by conflict and disaster. She has represented Imperial College London internationally, helped strengthen global rehabilitation networks and contributed extensively to public engagement, including organising research showcases attended by His Majesty King Charles III, the Duke of Sussex, WHO Director-General and the First Lady of Ukraine.

Claudia’s ambition is to continue bridging engineering, clinical practice and humanitarian response to reshape paediatric prosthetic care worldwide, ensuring every child has the chance to move, grow, and thrive.

The Mercia Award is made annually to a student for a postgraduate paper describing how engineering techniques are being used for the advancement of medical treatment and provides a medal and bursary towards the cost of a taught or research programme of postgraduate studies in Medical Engineering.

The Worshipful Company of Engineers Charitable Trust (the Engineers Trust) promotes the contributions of engineers to benefit society, education and research, and the relief of hardship and poverty.

Award photo courtesy of Mark Witter Photography